(For those of you who don’t know, this type of hernia is when your intestines start protruding through a weakness or tear in your abdominal wall and show up as a bulge on the outside of your belly. (more…)

Coming back to training after a layoff is a tricky thing. There is a real danger that you jump back into full intensity training and re-injure yourself right off the bat (especially if you’ve been gone for a while and/or are coming back from an injury). (more…)

Q:“I’m 56 years old and in pretty good health except for a few old injuries. My question is whether it is it too late for me to start training in grappling without wrecking my body too badly? (I’m not interested in competition).” (more…)

Today I’m going to tell you about one of the sillier ideas I’ve ever had…

About 10 years ago I got interested in functional training and sports specific exercises. I wanted to get away from the Pec Deck and do exercises that more closely mimicked the movements I was using on a daily basis in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, judo and wrestling. (more…)

Back when I was mostly training in Judo I heard that there were some traditional dojos in Japan where tapping out to a choke was frowned upon – even in club sparring sessions you were supposed to fight the choke right to the bitter end (more…)

A few days ago, in class, it was time to spar. I walked over to an older white belt, new to the club, who was standing by himself at the edge of the mat. I introduced myself and asked if he wanted to do some rolling. (more…)

I trained with Denis Kang for the first five or six years of his MMA career. At some point during that time he became very, very difficult to sweep. Partially this was due to his increasing technical knowledge, but it was also more than that. (more…)

Acquiring new skill sets and polishing your existing skills is the very essence of training. When everything is working properly and you’re surfing up the learning curve it is an exhilarating process. (more…)

If you said “breakfast” then you’re wrong, at least if you’re a hard-training combat athlete. According to Martin Rooney, author of ‘Training For Warriors, the Team Renzo Gracie Workout’, the two most important meals of the day are your pre and post-workout meals.

I recently had a great discussion with Dan and Caleb from TheFightwork’s Podcast about the role of leglocks in Brazilian jiu- jitsu. We discussed a lot of things leglock, including how to train them safely (more…)

Stephan’s note: todays’s tip is brought to you a guest columnist, my friend Don Whitefield (www.jiujitsulife.com). Not only does he offer good advice for older BJJ players, but if young punks were to adopt some of the advice I guarantee they’d get better faster… (more…)

We’ve been discussing injuries a lot recently, and it seems to have hit a chord with the Grapplearts readership. I don’t want to beat a dead horse, but I wanted to discuss one more thing before we leave this topic. (more…)

Several years ago I found myself waiting for a Jean Jacques Machado seminar to start: I was sitting on the mat, watching people train, and chatting with a friend. Jean Jacques, the jiu-jitsu superstar, strolled over to us and told me something that I think about almost every time I train. (more…)

Q: “I’m in my forties and and started MMA training a few years ago. Since then I have had many injuries including a shattered elbow, a torn knee, separations in both shoulders, and many, many more minor injuries. (more…)

Physical attributes are things like balance, neck strength, limb length, explosiveness, leg flexibility, and percent body fat. Your physical attributes are the foundation of what you can do with your body, and are influenced by genetics, training, age and injuries. (more…)

If you are a longtime reader of this newsletter you know that I think very highly of running as a conditioning method. Long runs, sprints, hill runs – as you can see from the following articles I think that they are all great. (more…)

Q:You’ve previously discussed dangerous submissions. Do you think that the twister spine lock is a dangerous submission? How dangerous is the twister compared to other submissions, say something like a toehold? (more…)